April 26, 2025

Mini Sandblaster

This is a air nozzle type mini sandblasters, I’ve seen other people make these before and thought I’d give it a try for a project I am working on.

I’m doing a little house remodeling and I have 16 of these cheap plastic closet pole sockets to clean up and repaint. I did about 6 of them by hand with various methods such as paint thinner and sandpaper but it’s a PITA and they still are not perfect (the ones on the right are what I’ve done) so I though maybe sand blasting them would be worth a shot.

I picked up one of these cheap blow guns from Harbor Freight awhile ago and figured it be the perfect thing to use for the price. ($3)

I started by just cutting a section in the pipe with a round file.

Most people just drill a hole in the soda bottle and poke the pipe threw it but I wanted something I little more refined so I design this adapter block in CAD that the bottle can screw onto. This will make refilling the bottle much easier.

Because of the bend in the pipe I had to design it in two pieces and it was then 3D printed.

Once clamped around the pipe the media from the bottle should feed right into the pipe to spray.

One side of the block was tapped to accept 4-40″ screws.

I also added a few filament alignment pins to keep things straight while screwing it together.

Here is the completed sandblaster ready for testing.

I am going to be using play sand for media only because its what I already have. Sand is probably the worse thing you can try to blast with for many reasons (google it.)

I only started with a small amount.

Here it is all set for testing.

Since there is no blast cabinet I will be wearing some basic PPE.

Here are the before and after pictures of the first test.  It did work pretty well but the sand does leave a rough finish and still will require a bit of final sanding but at least it didn’t totally destroy the plastic.  It worked pretty quickly too these results only took like 30 seconds. I would have tried filming the action but with no cabinet involved the sand does ricochet off the part so I wasn’t risking damaging my phones camera lens. (I would definitely recommend a full face shield for PPE if you try this.) Overall it worked good but does go threw the sand and air tank pretty quick so a larger compressor is required.  It was so much easier and quicker than trying to save these by doing everything by hand. The blast area is pretty small too and I’m wondering if some type of nozzle on the tip would help things…. I might have to machine one up in the future.

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